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I made this for my daughter after we both treated ourselves to a beautiful fossilised shark’s tooth from the lovely jeweller’s shop on Park Lane in Macclesfield. I watched a few videos on youtube to learn how to wire wrap the tooth and added a small larimar bead to make it look pretty. I used beading wire to string the beads and finished it off with a couple of crimp beads (again, I learned about these from youtube.)

The gemstones I used are moonstone, peach moonstone, clear quartz, sunstone and larimar. The necklace also has light wood and dark wood spacer beads, recycled from necklaces I bought at a charity shop, and also some cut glass faceted beads.

Luckily she really likes it, which I’m glad about since it took me several hours to make (being a beginner and all.) Now I just have to make myself one, but I need to decide which crystals I’d like first. Decisions decisions!! xx

Before I go any further, I should say that I haven’t been into jewelry making very long (a few weeks) and my efforts so far are all a bit hit and miss. I don’t mind too much, since I’m enjoying tinkering about with all the sparkly beads etc.

Anyway, I made this stretchy bracelet yesterday. It’s mostly made of rainbow fluorite which always seems to make me feel nice when I wear it. In addition, there is a large druzy quartz bead (dyed), 2 prehnite chips, 2 opalite beads (which I thought were moonstones – ya live and learn), 2 gold spacers and a large rose quartz bead.

I added the rose quartz as I haven’t figured out how to tie a neat knot in the elastic, so I put a blob of glue onto the big messy knot and pushed it inside the bead hole (none of the others were big enough). Et voila! A hidden knot and a reversable bracelet! It looks kind of nice whether I wear it with the rose quartz bead on top or the druzy quartz.

Incidentally, I got all the beads online, apart from the tiny gold spacers, which I recycled. Hope you like it!!

It seems that my poll was a failure. Not one vote you miserable lot! (I don’t know what I expected from a one day old blog, but there you go; I’m ever the optimist.)

Nevertheless, I have made my decision. I’m plumping for the A230. In the end, I decided I can brush up on French myself. I expect the English Lit course will be more useful to me, if not more arduous to get through.

I’m going to try and blog my way through it, so that future students can see what it’s like and therefore help with their decision. If I keep it up it’ll be a miracle! I’m very good at starting things; not so good at seeing them through. This is one of my biggest faults, but I’m working on it.

Well for the past few weeks I’ve been agonising (yes AGONISING) over whether to study A230 with OU from October.

I’m studying for an open degree, and I’ve just completed A215 Creative writing. The forums there highlighted how terrible I am at analysing other people’s work, so I feel I would benefit from some form of study in this area before I tackle creative writing at level 3. However, I’m a bit terrified at the prospect of all that reading and essay writing alongside my (extremely inconvenient and annoying) job, messy house (and brain) and family shenanigans.

Anyway, I’ve reserved a place, applied for (and been accepted for) financial help and bought the books, but for some reason I can’t press that final button to register. What is wrong with me? Has anybody out there already done this course? Is it doable alongside a full time job or should I try and swap my financial support over to do French instead. I love studying French, but the OU course seems a bit corporate and drab and I’m worried it would bore me poopless. What should I do? Aaaargh!! I can’t decide! D: